Pokemon Go made us all way more active in 2016… for a while

Mid-2016 you were striding around your city on a mad hunt to catch ‘em all in Pokemon Go… but weeks later you abandoned your preciously hoarded Pikachus and Geodudes after you lost interest in the game.

You and everyone else, it turns out: a study by a Harvard University team has not-so-surprisingly determined that the wildly popular augmented reality game didn’t have a long-term impact on our health.

The research, published in the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal (which traditionally spotlights quirky scientific endeavours), found the smartphone game did have a big short-term impact on its adult players’ fitness.

Katherine Howe, a member of the Harvard team, said she was inspired to investigate Pokemon Go’s health benefits after seeing one of her friends running “for the first time” in pursuit of a rare pocket monster.

The flurry of activity prompted speculation that Pokemon Go had invented the perfect way to finally get us lazy no-good smartphone addicts out into nature.

To test whether this was true, the Harvard team surveyed 1,182 Go players aged between 18 and 35, using data from their iPhones to calculate their daily number of steps.

The first week of playing Pokemon Go was indeed impressive: those 955 extra steps worked out to an extra 750m or 11 minutes of walking per day, a solid contribution to the 150 minutes of moderate physical activity per week recommended by experts.

But over the next six weeks, the Pokemon trainers gradually progressed from Rapidashes to Slowpokes and finally to Snorlaxes: by the end of the survey period, participants’ number of daily steps had returned to pre-Pokemon Go levels.

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health/British Medical Journal/YouTube

Despite that, the study’s authors optimistically described the game’s health impact as “moderate”.

“Even if smaller amounts of physical activity might also be important for health outcomes, the increase in steps from Pokemon Go, as with many physical activity interventions, was not sustained over time,” they wrote.

Senior author Eric Rimm added that “we just have to be more creative about finding ways to get people to keep exercising.” (The new Pokemon added to Pokemon Go this week probably aren’t going to cut it.)

Although Pokemon Go didn’t make adults any fitter, the Harvard team concluded that the effect might be different for children, and that there might be other benefits from playing the game (such as “increased social connectedness and improved mood”) that mean all those hours you spent playing weren’t wasted.